Saturday, August 5, 2006

Natalee Holloway is missing, and so are a lot of other people

Natalee Holloway's mom crushed by loss of 'last shot': In case you were hiding under a rock on Mars .. the capsule summary of who Natalee is/was: She was vacationing with her family in Aruba (an island country off the coast of South America) when she disappeared under mysterious circumstances. There was a big whoopdedoo made over the case, and it made the national media frenzy pattern for a couple weeks.

This kind of media frenzy happens all the time. The facts are someone gets killed, or gets arrested, or exposes their private parts, etc. Somehow that event triggers the national media frenzy pattern when other people doing the same event does not trigger that frenzy.

For example the current media frenzy is because Mel Gibson got arrested for Drinking while Under the Influence of Alchohol (DUI). People get arrested for DUI every day, in the hundreds. Yet, it's Mel Gibson, and he was recorded swearing at the Jews and how they control everything etc. So his ravings about the Jews are making the news frenzy go nuts, fueled I think by the belief that racial slurs against the Jews are more important than racial slurs against others.

The National Crime Information Center’s (NCIC’s) Missing Person File was implemented in 1975. Records in the Missing Person File are retained indefinitely, until the individual is located or the record is canceled by the entering agency. The Missing Person File contains records for missing who:

have a proven physical or mental disability (Disability – EMD),

are missing under circumstances indicating that they may be in physical danger (Endangered – EME),

are missing after a catastrophe (Catastrophe Victim – EMV),

are missing under circumstances indicating their disappearance may not have been voluntary (Involuntary – EMI),

are under the age of 21 and do not meet the above criteria (Juvenile – EMJ), or

are 21 and older and do not meet any of the above criteria but for whom there is a reasonable concern for their safety (Other – EMO).

As of December 31, 2005, there were 109,531 active missing person records in NCIC. Juveniles under the age of 18 account for 58,081 (53.03 %) of the records and 11,868 (10.84 %) were for juveniles between the ages of 18 and 20.

During 2005, 834,536 missing person records were entered into NCIC, an increase of 0.51 % from the 830,325 entered in 2004. Missing Person records cleared or canceled during the same period totaled 844,838. Reasons for these removals include: a law enforcement agency located the subject, the individual returned home, or the record had to be removed by the entering agency due to a determination that the record is invalid.

There were over 834,536 missing person reports during 2005. Yet this one, of a cute white girl vacationing in Aruba, gets huge media attention when the others do not.